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Saturday, May 20, 2006

An American Idea Shatters - by Sidney Blumenthal

Update: May 20, 2006And here is a delightful graphic that is making the rounds on the rightwing blogs. Now that the tighty-righties aren't getting things EXACTLY as they wanted, well, wouldn't you know it, they have found the neocon cabal they "elected" to office not quite to their liking. NOW they think these folks are the enemy we told them they were for 7 long years. NOW they want to see them thrown out on their cans. NOW they are playing all innocent and betrayed. NOW they won't acknowledge thay had a hand in bringing this nation to its knees. Oh, no. It's not their fault. It's the fault of these guys alone. Oh, yeah and while "Neo-Jacobins" would have sufficed to describe these folks, the reactionary regressives have to throw in the term "Liberals", even though they would be the first to say that the term has changed meanings in the past century or two (and have, I've read their arguments "liberal vs libertarian" etc etc.) BLOODY WANKERS!! --pseudolus================================================

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After a 60 year campaign to demonize and defeat the democratic legacy of FDR, after 30 years of struggle to downplay the disasterous Nixon legacy, and after 6 years of actually commandeering all 3 federal branches to an unprecedented degree, republicans were united in achieving their goals. Today they are in disarray as the various factions fight to get the particular points of their agendas put into play. The theocrats of the religious right want their due. The kleptocrats of the coporate world want their due. The plutocrats and the de facto oligarchs of inherited wealth want their due. The jacobins of the neocon cabal want their due. Some of these goals are mutually exclusive and neither side is willing to compromise in the slightest degree. Nowhere is this split more obvious today than on the immigration issue. The lower and middle class republican voters are alarmed to see the labor market diluted by an influx of workers. This drives wages and benefits down for everyone. On the other hand the corporate masters want this very thing. They want a cheap, docile labor force they can exploit and grow their fortunes from. This also plays to their racist fears as well if those workers are brown skinned and alien tongued. What was once ably exploited by the g.o.p.'s 'southern strategy' of the 60s now comes back to bite them on the ass. Time for the Democrats to step up and reclaim these lost souls. --pseudolus

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An American Idea Shatters

: The Reawakening of a Virulent Nationalism is Tearing Apart Bush's Conservative Coalition

President Bush's nationally televised address on immigration on Monday night was intended as a grand gesture to revive his collapsing presidency, but instead he has plunged the Republicans into a political centrifuge, breaking the party down into its raw elements, whose collisions are triggering explosions of unexpected and ever greater magnitude.

The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community. The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate. The evangelical religious right is paralysed while the Catholic church is a mobilising force behind demonstrations by Hispanic immigrants. Every effort Bush makes to hold a nonexistent Republican centre generates an opposing effect within his party.

Bush's victory in 2004 depended on the management of highly volatile constituencies: the religious right was shepherded by referendums against gay marriage; the abortion issue was used to elevate Catholic conservatives and isolate progressive-minded bishops; nativists were captivated by hosts of enemies in the whirlwind of September 11.

Bush's political handlers were determined to suppress immigration as an issue. Hispanics made up 14% of the population in 2004, and Bush's ability to capture Catholic and Hispanic voters was one of the decisive factors in winning a second term. However, as Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism has filled the vacuum. Bush conflated the fears arising from September 11 with Iraq, but the fear of the other is now being directed at immigrants - a nativist tradition that goes back to the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan.

================Yet another split in the rightwing...Scalia Tells Congress to Mind Its Own BusinessJustice Antonin Scalia rebuked fellow conservatives on Capitol Hill yesterday, saying they have gone too far in trying to prevent the Supreme Court from using foreign law in its constitutional rulings.

Scalia dissented vigorously from the court's recent decisions that invoked foreign law to help strike down the death penalty for juveniles and laws against consensual homosexual conduct. In Congress, conservative Republicans responded angrily to the rulings and introduced bills that would either condemn or ban the court's use of foreign legal authorities.--------read the rest...CLICK HERE

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